14 Billions (2010) by
Tomás Saraceno.
Bonniers Konsthall,
Stockholm, Photo
credit: Studio
Saraceno.
Markus Buehler, John Ochsendorf and Tomás Saraceno at “Reverberations:
Spiders and Musical Webs,”
the MIT Museum, 2014.
Photo: Barry Hetherington.
As part of his research into social spiders and
their three-dimensional webs, Saraceno has
been working with Professor Markus Buehler
and Dr. Zhao Qin, a research scientist in Civil
Engineering at MIT. In their recent talk at
the MIT Museum exhibition “Reverberations:
Spiders and Musical Webs,” Saraceno and MIT
Professor Markus Buehler discussed their research in materials and structures inspired by
the intricate geometry of spiderwebs. Using
the data from his digitally captured three-dimensional spider web, Saraceno reconstructed
SciArt in America February 2015
the web 16 times its original size for his installation 14 Billions (Working Title), 2010. Buehler’s
lab created a computer simulation of the data
set generated by this project to reveal how the
strands behave and interact in the physical web.
Saraceno developed an original tomographic
method, using a laser sheet, to scan a three-dimensional web built by Latrodectus mactans. This
pioneering technique made access to the complete and accurate three-dimensional data of a
spider web possible for the first time. Such data
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